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It’s official: there is a brain drain

By WILLIAM BOWN

After three years of government denials, science minister William Waldegrave
finally conceded last week that British science is suffering a brain drain.
‘Clearly there are quite a lot of people who would prefer to remain in this
country if they could,’ he told New Scientist. ‘The question is: are you
keeping all the people you want to keep? The answer to that is: not entirely.
I know of individuals I am disappointed are not working in this country.’

About 1000 British researchers, mainly young scientists who have recently
completed PhDs, move to the US each year. Waldegrave said he would be looking
closely at what could be done for these researchers. ‘There is certainly
a career issue,’ he said.

In 1989, Robert Jackson, a junior minister responsible for science,
said the brain drain was a myth, and the government has rejected the idea
ever since. This is the first official acknowledgment of the problem.

When Waldegrave announced a White Paper on science and technology last
month, he said he expected the paper to be ‘largely organisational’. But
he may take the opportunity to put forward a strategy for science and technology.
This would be the first since 1971.

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‘There is a level of strategy that may be worth considering,’ he said.
‘It has got to be very secure strategic thinking – training, investment
and research – over a number of years.

He gave one example of the sort of strategies he might pursue. ‘It may
be that the era of a certain kind of physics-based science is at its mature
point and that the next era is going to be based on a collection of life
sciences where we are particularly strong on the basic science and the industrial
research.’ It would be a tragedy if Britain let the commercial opportunities
of this new era slip away, he said.

Waldegrave would like to see more collaboration between countries. Building
both the Large Hadron Collider in Europe and the Superconducting Supercollider
in Texas is ‘stupid’, he says. Both machines will cost billions of dollars
and the main aim of both is to detect a hypothetical subatomic particle
called the Higgs boson. ‘There should be a global facility,’ he said.

As he takes the chair of the council of research ministers during Britain’s
presidency of the European Community, Waldegrave aims to establish new ground
rules for the £4 billion Framework research programme. The object,
he says, should be to fund ‘generic’ research which can be applied in many
different ways.

‘The place for effort is on broadly based strategic research with lots
of applications – not just with a few big corpor-ations, but seeding the
next generation of companies.’